North Syracuse e-waste program a ‘win-win’

North Syracuse  The village of North Syracuse is looking into ways to dispose of the community's electronic waste or “e-waste” through Regional Computer Recycling and Recovery, a company out of Victor, NY.

New York state's Electronics Equipment Recycling and Reuse Act was passed on May 28, 2010, and it is now illegal to throw electronics out with the regular trash. This includes computers, televisions, small scale servers, monitors, keyboards and computer mice, fax machines, printers, scanners, cell phones, VCRs, DVRs, portable digital music players, DVD players, digital converter boxes, cable or satellite receivers, electronic or video game consoles and other devices.

“We're going to do something with it, and it's probably going to be early summer before we can get the program together,” said Deputy Mayor Chuck Henry. “We want to be able to help the residents of the community dispose of this stuff. I can't tell you how many times I've gone down the road and seen a monitor, a keyboard, even a TV just thrown on the side of the road. We just want to make things easier for our residents as far as getting rid of it.”

The e-waste company offers its collection services free of charge, but the village is hoping to offer curb service to residents so they don't have to bring their electronic trash to a collection point.

Henry said the village would like to combine the e-waste pickup with the yearly heavy trash pickup it does two weeks out of the year. But he said the village wants to streamline the process so the village curbsides don't look so unkempt.

“What we want to try to tie this into is we have a heavy trash pickup that we do once a year,” Henry said. “We're going to revamp it. We're going to tie the two programs together and try to make things a little easier for the residents.